Vessel

by Lisa A. Nichols

  “Let’s verify that they exist first, before we start worrying about that.” Cal squeezed her hand and let it go. The warmth lingered on Catherine’s skin, more soothing than she wanted to admit.

  “ ‘We,’ ” Catherine said suddenly.

  “Huh?”

  “You keep saying ‘we.’ ‘Before we start worrying.’ ”

  “Well . . . yeah.” Cal gave her a puzzled look. If he tilted his head, he’d look like a baffled golden retriever, and Catherine had to fight a smile. “We’re the only ones who know about this. The first thing we need is more information,” Cal said.

  “Where do we start?”

  Cal rubbed his eyes before answering. “Some of it might come from you, if you start remembering things. There might be some reports hidden away that describe anomalies from your mission, or Iris Addy’s. I haven’t seen them, but I can look.”

  “They didn’t tell me about any, if there are.”

  “Yeah . . . that doesn’t mean much. Something like that would be classified ‘need to know’ immediately. And of course,” he added, “mere astronauts don’t need to know that.”

  “You know people would say we’re both crazy.”

  “Feh,” he said cheerfully. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone’s said that to me. Besides, they told Galileo he was crazy, right? And probably Einstein. Sometimes you gotta be crazy to make any progress.”

  “NASA doesn’t like crazy these days.” Catherine felt a wry smile tugging at her mouth. “Crazy isn’t politically expedient.”

  “Again, I say feh.” He really was on her side. He’d been against her only when he thought she was trying to hide the truth. Which . . . she supposed, she had been. She’d been afraid of the truth. She still was, but now she wasn’t afraid alone. And that made more of a difference than she could have imagined.

  “The way I see it—God, that’s awful,” he said, grimacing after taking a sip of coffee, “once we have proof of their existence, the two biggest questions we have to answer are how and why. How are they controlling you? And why do they want to destroy Sagittarius II?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I’ve felt—I’m not sure how to describe it. When I’ve had those violent, repulsive thoughts, it’s like I got pushed out of the driver’s seat. And . . . last night, when we were fighting, I pushed my way back.”

  “Lucky for me,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Not another word. You didn’t do it.” Cal leaned back, thinking.

  “I don’t understand,” Catherine said. “We sent probes to TRAPPIST years before Sagittarius I. And you saw the data we managed to send back. Nothing showed any signs of intelligent life.”

  Cal lowered his mug. “ ’What if this species, whatever it is, has evolved into a form that we can’t track or recognize?”

  “Like what?”

  “Any number of things,” Cal said. He looked for all the world like a graduate student having a theoretical discussion with some classmates. “They might be microscopic. Hell, they might not be made up of anything we recognize as living, organic material.”

  “How the hell do we find something like that?”

  Cal grinned. “I have no idea. But we’ll figure it out with some more data.”

  “Oh God,” Catherine said suddenly. “We’ve got to let the crew know what they’re heading into.”

  “I have a better idea,” Cal said, his expression turning more thoughtful. “How about we bring them back?”

  “How are we going to do that? If no one wants to know the truth because of bad publicity, they’re sure not going to let us do that.”

  “I don’t know yet.” Cal leaned back into her sofa. “We’ve got just over three weeks to find evidence that letting Sagittarius II land on TRAPPIST-1f would be worse optics than calling them back and scrapping the mission.” He glanced over. “You up for the challenge?”

  “I am if you are.”

  “It’s got to be good. We’ve got to find something they can’t argue with. Some sort of proof, hard proof, that these life-forms exist,” Cal grumbled, thumping his head against the cushion. “I guess if we fail we can make some good money on the basic cable circuit, right?”

  “They’d probably give you your own show.” She joked, but he was right. They had to convince people who stubbornly didn’t want to believe.

  Cal let out a frustrated breath. “If only we had someone who could substantiate your story. Someone else who came back from the mission.”

  “One more reason being a sole survivor sucks.”

  Cal laughed, startled. “I bet that’s a long list.”

  She hadn’t meant it as a joke, but she laughed with him. “Yeah. Yeah, it really is.”

  “Right, so no one to back up your story. Too bad.”

  “Yeah, no one’s exactly been in my shoes before—” Wait. Catherine stopped herself. You don’t want to end up like Commander Addy. I don’t want to see that happen to you, Dr. Darzi warned her. What had Addy seen on her own trip through ERB Prime? What had she heard? “Cal . . . what about Commander Addy?”

  “Addy . . . she didn’t go to TRAPPIST, though—” His eyes lit up. “But she did go through the wormhole.”

  “And every time I started pushing for the truth, my therapist used her as a cautionary tale.”

  “Yeah, but that’s because when she came back, she returned with some pretty wild stories, apparently.” Cal broke into a smile and planted a loud, sudden kiss on Catherine’s cheek. “And the same strange antibodies you have! Colonel Wells, you are a certified mad genius. If we could track her down, you two could compare stories.”

  “How are we going to do that?”

  “I have some ideas. Worst case, we find her and go see her. You up for a possible road trip?” Cal was the one who looked like a mad genius now, a wild grin on his face.

  “Let’s find our missing commander,” she said.

  31

  CATHERINE HADN’T THOUGHT Cal was serious about a road trip, but when attempts to reach Commander Addy via email and phone both failed, they started making plans. Cal was able to dig up an address for her, deep in the Arizona desert in a place so tiny it wasn’t even an actual town—just a general store and a stoplight.

  They planned to take off for a weekend to track her down, flying to Phoenix and driving the rest of the way. Maybe nothing would come of it, but Catherine felt like they were doing something. Slowly, the feeling of being helpless, of being frozen, was falling away.

  The night before they were due to leave she called Julie, so someone would know where she was going. She didn’t want to tell David. The fewer people at NASA who knew where she and Cal were going, the better.

  “Wait,” Julie said after being quiet. “Who is this guy again?”

  “Cal’s one of the guys working on Sagittarius II. We’ve got a lead on some information that might affect the current mission.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? I mean, this seems sudden after— well, you’ve been having a bad time lately.”

  “I’m doing a lot better,” Catherine reassured her. “No more drinking. This trip—it’s a good thing, okay? It’s me taking positive steps.”

  “But doesn’t it seem a little, I dunno—a little risky to you?” Julie was typing as she spoke. “Cal Morganson, you said?”

  “Yeah. What do you mean, risky?”

  “I mean, this guy you’ve literally never mentioned before suddenly wants you to go away with him to some remote place . . . and you’re being awfully closemouthed about why.”

  Catherine laughed. “Are you saying you think he’s going to hurt me?”

  “No, I just—oh.” Julie stopped typing and her tone changed. “Is there something I need to know about this guy?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Are you sure this is just about business? What kind of ‘positive steps’ are you talking about?”

  Catherine was too startled to answer at first. �
��What? Of course it’s business. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “ ’Cause I’m sitting here looking at a picture of Cal Morganson at NASA, and honey, you didn’t tell me he was pretty.”

  “Cal?” Catherine laughed. “You think that me and Cal—no.” Pretty? She’d noticed that he was attractive, and he was a lot nicer than she’d originally thought, but . . . that was ridiculous. “He’s like, half my age or something.”

  “Catherine Marie Wells, I am not looking at the face of a twenty-one-year-old right now. Sure he’s younger than you, but boy, wouldn’t that piss David off?”

  “Julie.” Catherine paused, patiently. “I am not trying to piss David off. And Cal is just a guy I work with.” She laughed again, because honestly. “I can’t believe you looked him up.”

  “Kiddo, I’ve been vetting your dates since you were sixteen. You think I’m gonna stop now?”

  “Oh my God, stop. This is for work. Can we drop this?” The humor was rapidly diminishing, and Catherine couldn’t put a finger on why her discomfort was growing.

  “Fine, fine. I’m just sayin’. You could do worse. But— I’m done. Subject changed. When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know for sure. It depends on what we find. Shouldn’t be more than a couple of days. I’ll have my cell phone, but we’re gonna be in the middle of nowhere, so I don’t know how good service will be.” Catherine paused. “Jules, don’t mention this to David, okay? I don’t want him to worry.”

  “You realize that’s not making me feel any better about this.”

  “I know, but just . . . trust me. Please?”

  There was a long silence on the line, and then Julie said, “All right. I trust you. Take care of yourself. Call me as soon as you can.”

  By the time she met Cal at the airport, Catherine was starting to have doubts of her own. It was ungodly early; the sun was barely up. What were they doing? What did they think they were going to find, talking to someone so thoroughly discredited at NASA that hardly anyone mentioned her name anymore?

  Cal met her at the gate, and she almost didn’t recognize him, hiding behind a pair of sunglasses. Like her, he’d dressed casually in jeans. They looked like tourists, and Catherine had to repress the urge to laugh wildly. Somehow they’d both made the decision to look as unofficial and nongovernmental as possible.

  “You made it,” he said. “I wondered if you’d change your mind.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not the correct code phrase. If you’re my contact, you should be saying something about the rain in Germany at this time of year.” Catherine sat next to him at the gate.

  “. . . What?” The sunglasses came off and Cal looked at her closely.

  Catherine gave in to the desire to laugh, which didn’t make Cal look less worried. “The sunglasses. You look like you’re trying to go incognito.”

  Cal finally smiled, catching on. “Okay, it’s a little cloak-and-dagger. Aaron would kick my ass if he could see me right now.”

  “He’d probably kick both our asses.” She paused. “And then fire us.”

  “And maybe have us committed,” Cal added. They were serious until their eyes met, then they both burst out laughing.

  * * *

  The drive from Phoenix to Rough Rock was supposed to take five hours. Catherine drove the first leg. They listened to the radio for a while, with a little bit of conversation here and there, but by the time they switched driving duties, they’d left most of the radio signals far behind.

  The rental car didn’t do a great job of keeping the road noise out after Catherine snapped off the radio. A dull rushing noise filled the silence as the desert went past Catherine’s window. It was bright and hot, the sky white-blue. Despite the rental’s air-conditioning, she could feel the heat baking through the glass.

  After a period of awkward silence, Cal said, “All right, Wells. Truth or . . . truth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen or done?”

  “Do I need to remind you that I’ve been to an actual other planet?”

  “Yeah, but you don’t remember it. Still, fair enough. On Earth. What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done on Earth?”

  Catherine thought for a moment. “You’ve gone through the astronaut training program, right?” she asked.

  “A slightly abbreviated version; I was never a candidate, but I wanted to get a sense of what you guys go through.”

  “Did you do the simulation?” The simulation was a monthlong exercise where a “crew” lived in a replica of a ship like Sagittarius.

  Cal looked away from the road as a semi barreled past going the other way on the two-lane highway. “I skipped out on that particular experience.”

  “Uh-huh. I should have guessed.” Catherine grinned. “Well, some of us didn’t have that luxury. After the first couple of days, it got dull. We were mostly waiting for Mission Control to throw a crisis at us so we’d have something to do. Except some of us found ways to amuse ourselves.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I don’t know how well you knew Richie Almeida, but that was one man you did not want to let get bored. When Richie got bored, he got creative.”

  “You never want your systems operator to get bored,” Cal agreed. “What’d he do?”

  “I still don’t know how he did it, but he reprogrammed the onboard computer to respond to commands with a verbal response.” She shook her head, laughing. “Made the mission ‘commander’ absolutely batshit. Every time one of us typed in a command we’d hear something like ‘Aye, aye, Captain!’ or ‘I’m afraid I canna do that, Captain.’ ”

  “The onboard computers don’t have a voice response system,” Cal said.

  “By the time Richie was done with it, that one did. He was just using recordings.” She laughed, remembering. “It was like being around someone who had the ringtone collection from hell. Any alert we got was prefaced with ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ ”

  “I mean, that’s funny, but that’s the craziest thing? Really?”

  “That was just the start. I told you that the simulation commander was losing his mind over this, right? Tried everything to get Richie to change it back. NASA wouldn’t interfere since, you know, it was designed to test our responses to the unpredictable. Hell, I’m not convinced that they didn’t help him set it up.” She chuckled. “The commander in question was David.”

  “David Wells? Your— I’m sorry, what do I call him right now?”

  Catherine wrinkled her nose. “Soon-to-be ex is probably accurate enough. Anyway, yes. And he was not happy. But the kicker came when he did a test ‘space walk.’ I swear, Richie was saving this for a special occasion. When David tried to come back in, the air lock wouldn’t open. He yelled for us to let him in, and the computer said . . .”

  “No.” Cal started to laugh.

  Catherine laughed with him. “Yes. The computer said, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that. . . . This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.’ I thought David was gonna have a stroke. Mission Control was in tears laughing. I think everybody saw it coming except him. The rest of the simulation, any time David did anything with the main computer, he got HAL 9000 answering him.”

  “I’m surprised Almeida didn’t wash out after that.”

  “That’s why I think he had the brass behind him, to be honest.” Catherine shook her head, realizing something. “That . . . might have been one of the reasons David washed out. He never really talked to me about it.”

  Cal made a noncommittal noise and they were both suddenly quiet.

  “Anyway,” Catherine said, shaking it off, “what about you? What’s the craziest thing you’ve seen or done?”

  “Well . . . I was an undergrad at Caltech.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Aha, I see our reputation precedes us.” Cal flashed her a smile. “Can you hand me a water?”

  “I’ve known a few Caltech engineers.” Catherine reached into the back seat to the small
Styrofoam cooler packed with ice and bottles of water and grabbed two. She handed one to him before cracking hers open. “What’d you do?”

  “Well. The head of the physics department was notorious for telling students that if they failed out of school, they’d have to get a job working at a car wash.” Cal managed to open the water while keeping his hands marginally on the steering wheel. “He’d say it before every exam. It was annoying as hell.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Catherine said with a laugh.

  “I know. Like, why a car wash, right? Still, by my senior year, we could recite it along with him.” Cal paused, took a drink of water. “He also, we discovered, had a classic 1980 BMW that he was crazy proud of. It was a collector’s edition or something, and the damn thing was his baby.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. He gave us a target. Never,” he proclaimed, “give an engineering student a grudge and a target.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We washed his car.” He gave her a smug look. “In the men’s locker room showers.”

  “How the hell did you manage to get it in there?” Catherine laughed again.

  “Hello, Caltech engineering students. We figured it out.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I think he managed to reverse engineer how we got it in there, but last I heard, he’d stopped using his car-wash speech.”

  “Air Force pranks were never as good as the stories I hear from you geeks.” Catherine leaned back against the seat, smiling.

  “Come on. Didn’t you, like, steal a general’s plane or anything?”

  “Not me. I was a strictly-by-the-book sort of girl.”

  “Besides, you say ‘geek’ like you’re not one. I have bad news for you, Cath. You’re an astronaut. You’re pretty much Peak Geek.”

  A sign up ahead said they were getting close to Rough Rock. “Do we know exactly where she lives out here?”

  “Well . . . her address is general delivery, and GPS wasn’t any help. I think this is going to be a case of finding someone who knows her and hoping they can tell us which landmarks to follow.” Cal pointed at the GPS on the dash. “We’re gonna go to the main crossroads and start from there.”